The Great Controversy by Ellen White (Unabridged Version)

taught the people to receive a religion prohibited by the state, she declared, and had thus
transgressed God's command enjoining subjects to obey their princes. Knox answered firmly:
"As right religion took neither original strength nor authority from worldly princes, but
from the eternal God alone, so are not subjects bound to frame their religion according to the
appetites of their princes. For oft it is that princes are the most ignorant of all others in God's
true religion. . . . If all the seed of Abraham had been of the religion of Pharaoh, whose subjects
they long were, I pray you, madam, what religion would there have been in the world? Or if
all men in the days of the apostles had been of the religion of the Roman emperors, what
religion would there have been upon the face of the earth? . . . And so, madam, ye may perceive
that subjects are not bound to the religion of their princes, albeit they are commanded to give
them obedience."
Said Mary: "Ye interpret the Scriptures in one manner, and they [the Roman Catholic
teachers] interpret in another; whom shall I believe, and who shall be judge?" "Ye shall believe
God, that plainly speaketh in His word," answered the Reformer; "and farther than the word
teaches you, ye neither shall believe the one nor the other. The word of God is plain in itself;
and if there appear any obscurity in one place, the Holy Ghost, which is never contrary to
Himself, explains the same more clearly in other places, so that there can remain no doubt but
unto such as obstinately remain ignorant."--David Laing, The Collected Works of John Knox,
vol. 2, pp. 281, 284. Such were the truths that the fearless Reformer, at the peril of his life,
spoke in the ear of royalty. With the same undaunted courage he kept to his purpose, praying
and fighting the battles of the Lord, until Scotland was free from popery.
In England the establishment of Protestantism as the national religion diminished, but
did not wholly stop, persecution. While many of the doctrines of Rome had been renounced,
not a few of its forms were retained. The supremacy of the pope was rejected, but in his place
the monarch was enthroned as the head of the church. In the service of the church there was
still a wide departure from the purity and simplicity of the gospel. The great principle of
religious liberty was not yet understood. Though the horrible cruelties which Rome employed
against heresy were resorted to but rarely by Protestant rulers, yet the right of every man to
worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience was not acknowledged. All were
required to accept the doctrines and observe the forms of worship prescribed by the established
church. Dissenters suffered persecution, to a greater or less extent, for hundreds of years.
In the seventeenth century thousands of pastors were expelled from their positions. The
people were forbidden, on pain of heavy fines, imprisonment, and banishment, to attend any
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